Word: frenchman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...dropped circulars which said the Americans were coming. I was so incredulous that I told him I would give him ten francs for one! Just about then we could hear heavy firing up on the coast; still no one seemed to know what was going on. Shortly a Frenchman told me he had been up on the hotel roof, had found one of the circulars, and had seen what were apparently gun flashes at sea. So I decided to take a look. Soon I found two of the circulars, and brought them down to my room-one of them later...
...they were all put out of action with a frightful loss of life-all for nothing. One of the French warships returned all afire, and was run ashore making a horrible sight all that evening. Many were afraid there would be heavy air raids that night. One very kindly Frenchman came to me that evening and said, "Well, I hope your countrymen will permit us to sleep tonight." They did, and I began to hope that an armistice had been arranged, but the next morning things livened up again, and it appeared that a French warship tied...
...been truly marvelous that the town has suffered practically no damage with all the hell in the port. A Frenchman who had been caught in a hotel near the port told me he had never seen such superb gunnery in his life-that every shot which came in landed in the port and none lit in the town. Some shell fragments did scatter, naturally, and in at least one other locality, some houses were hit and a number of Arabs were killed. However, I would not have believed it possible for operations on such a scale to cause so little...
...world jostled each other-and frequently fought-in dark and narrow streets. Its houses were ugly and dirty, narrow and low. Wash lines were strung from window to window across the streets, and all the time heads were wagging behind the drying clothes in interminable conversation. Even for a Frenchman the argot is difficult, if not impossible, to understand. But its rhythm and music are unforgettable and make you love it; and if you hear it in some distant corner of the world, it makes you homesick...
This book is called by its publishers the first "mature" novel by France's most famed detective-story writer, the creator of Inspector Maigret. Hot melodrama would be a better term for it. A young, naive Frenchman, Joseph Timar, goes out to work at the Equatorial African trading post of Libreville. At the town's only hotel, he stares at the grinning masks on the walls, cranks up a phonograph with a big, old-fashioned horn, drinks his first "peg" of whiskey and feels like a young rakehell. The feeling increases when Proprietress Adèle comes...